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03/20/2019 07:00 AMWhen Matthew Barney was casting the role of Diana, the goddess of the hunt, in a film he was making, he took out a copper engraving plate, which is about a quarter of an inch thick, set it up on its edge more than 100 feet away from Anette Wachter, and asked if she could split a bullet on it.
She did.
“You’re hired,” he said.
That anecdote drew an appreciative laugh from many of us in the crowd that had gathered to see the world premiere of that movie, Redoubt, on its debut weekend at the Yale University Art Gallery earlier this month.
Wachter—a member of the United States National Rifle Team with eight U.S. National Team Championships, three NRA National records, and more 25 International trophies to her name—is joined in the film by Barney himself, a renowned contemporary artist, as one of the lead characters. As it turns out, he says, she was an ideal person to work with in the film, which conveys the story entirely through movement, dance, choreography, visual elements, and sound. There is no spoken dialogue.
“Anette was all about being still and slowing down her heart rate,” he says. “It was interesting to pair her with dancers.”
In addition to employing the myth of Diana as a point of departure to explore a wolf hunt, the movie explores what it means to make art in an effort to get at what is true. The exhibition, Matthew Barney: Redoubt, connected with the film includes four monumental trees harvested from a burnt forest and transformed by Barney into sculptures through an explosive reaction with molten copper and brass. There are also a series of his engravings, which play a central role in the film, created with experimental techniques from electroplated copper plate on subjects that include the wolves, Diana, and the environment. And there is a book, also Redoubt, that addresses a wide range of issues that intersect in the film and exhibit with essays from a range of experts, along with photos from the exhibit and film.
Barney, while discussing his work with curator Pamela Franks following the movie opening, was particularly gratified that the project was having its debut “in a learning institution, where [it] will be used by students and in classes.”
“Artists want to feel like they are making something useful,” he says.
If this constellation of artworks, the book, and the film is to be useful, what are we to take away from the combined experience of all three?
Questions Worth Exploring
One answer to that question is that the exhibit—in addition to being visually spectacular and thought-provoking art that stands on its own—along with the book and the movie poses important questions about “humanity’s place in the natural world,” as the gallery’s literature points out, along with the influence of both geology and geography on those who, at the same time, would seek to impose order on and preserve their natural environment.
Barney’s work also provides those who enter it with a greater understanding of how it feels to be in a part of a redoubt, defined as an enclosed defensive position or fort. It shows what it feels like to be on the outside of one looking in, or someone trying to resolve the tension that comes from both being on the inside and on the outside, being both hunter and hunted, at the same time. It’s also a look at what it feels like to be in part of the country that many of us might not be familiar with, and that some might disdainfully consider as the fly-over state of Idaho.
The Sawtooth Mountain Range in Idaho, the isolated geographic region that is Barney’s focus in this project, is in the spectacularly beautiful, and sometimes environmentally harsh, heart of a region that the American Redoubt, a political movement that is just shy of about a decade old, identifies as a safe haven for survivalist libertarians. Some of them think of some of us as softy liberal lovers of the nanny state. And some of us think of some of them as gun-totin’ extremists preparing for The End of The World As We Know It (TEOTWAWKI, pronounced teo-twakeeē).
Us versus them.
That’s rarely a healthy dynamic, but one always well worth exploring.
Barney addressed the choice of the term “redoubt” for the title of the exhibit in a conversation he had with Franks, in an interview published the gallery’s magazine.
“With this project, I was interested in making a portrait of the central Idaho region that would allow for a broad range of energies and expressions, both beautiful and problematic. Central and southern Idaho are geographically isolated by the Rocky Mountains to the northeast and the High Desert to the southwest,” he says.
That isolation felt even more significant in the ‘70s and ‘80s when he was growing up than it does now.
Still, “...even now there are strong isolationist tendencies that carry on in that region. One extremist movement in parts of Idaho, eastern Oregon and Washington, and western Montana and Wyoming calls for a separation from government and urban life, and a return to the land and is known as the ‘American Redoubt.’ A redoubt generally refers to a defensive military fortification... or to a defense of a threatened social or psychological position. But for me, the term ‘redoubt’ resonates as a description of a more abstract form of isolation or withdrawal.”
The Power of Wolves
His desire to explore that dynamic was sparked when he was a teenager in the 1980s, and wolves were reintroduced into central Idaho in 1995, reigniting a longstanding local political debate. The wolves thrived and in 2009 Idaho began to allow wolf hunting, further deepening the intensity of the debate.
Some championed wolves as saviors of the ecosystem. Their theory was that, as an apex predator that killed off elk, wolves created opportunities for bison, antelope, ravens, eagles, aspen, willow, songbirds, waterfowl, and other flora and fauna to flourish.
“Most of these effects were entirely speculative,” says wolf researcher and wildlife expert Arthur D. Middleton in an essay in Redoubt, the book that is part of Barney’s project.
Middleton notes that others—particularly those who owned cattle being killed by the wolves, or those who liked to hunt elk—considered the reintroduction of the wolves as “government-sponsored terrorism.”
The different narratives put forth by the opposing sides did have one thing in common, Middleton notes in his essay, that wolves “hold immense power and they bring with them profound change,” and that the mythology surrounding them is similarly powerful.
“Nearly every story about wolves is true in one place and time, and yet false in another,” he writes. “We choose which stories to elevate and which details to emphasize, as well as which to ignore. We choose how to weave them all together into something bigger. And in this way, the stories we tell about wolves may forever tell us more about ourselves than they do about the animal.”
Frank, the curator of the exhibit, says Barney’s work hones in on “the in-betweenness, or the tension, really, of being pulled between perspectives.”
“Matthew talks about this project as a portrait of central Idaho, a physical portrait of a place, and a psychological portrait of its spirit. It’s about the experience of the place. Redoubt gives us a window on to a place and its character, in the way that great portraiture can,” she says. “It’s a complex piece, and shows all the different layers. It’s an interesting musing on the relationship of humankind to the natural world, and the way people interact with the landscape.”
One way the project explores the tension created by different perspectives is infusing the story of a modern-day wolf hunt, and current issues like governmental land management policies, with mythological stories that go back centuries. In addition to the story of Diana and Acteaon—a youth who inadvertently spied Diana while she was bathing and paid for it with his life when she transformed him into a stag that was killed by his own dogs—there are also echoes of the Apollo and Daphne myth, wherein Daphne allows herself to be transformed into a tree rather than submitting to the advances of Apollo.
The mythological power of trees, and how those myths are ingrained with our ideas of the American West are explored both in the book’s essays and in the exhibit, particularly in the sculpture Diana, a tree from a burnt out forest that Barney transforms into a massive breath-taking sculpture in part by applying a “liver-of-sulfur patina to the veil to create a polychromatic effect,” to mimic the Kryptek camouflage designs worn by Wachter’s Diana in the film, the book explains.
There also is a hearkening back to the Cosmic Hunt family of myths, one that involves a hunt and a beast that is transformed into a celestial constellation after being wounded.
“There is a movement from present and hot topics to eternal mythological stories,” Franks says.
The exhibit is intended to be provocative, Franks says.
“It spurs thinking,” she says. “It raises questions about humanity’s relationship to nature, and it raises questions about the value of art and the process of art-making...It takes on these very fundamental topics of our lives. How do we know what’s true? And what is the role of art in our capacity and desire to know what’s true? And how do we pursue that truth? What is the role of art in understanding what is true?”